Patient Responsibilities

In this Article:
Knowing Your Medical Rights
The Patient’s Bill of Rights
Patient Responsibilities

As a patient you need to assume your share of the effort towards returning you to health. No doctor should be expected to do it all. The following offers some tips on how you can play that active, responsible role.

Be honest and up front about yourself and your history

Some people prefer not to tell their doctors some things about their past, about their medical history, or about certain lifestyles of lifestyle decisions they have made, perhaps because these things embarrass them. But the only way your doctor can make the best most accurate diagnosis is if he is armed with the best and most accurate information.

Withholding any hospitalizations, past or current medications, past illnesses, habits—in short, putting a knowingly false answer on a questionnaire, or not truthfully answering his questions to you, puts your entire treatment into jeopardy. Nothing is worth that.

Confirm your treatment

Whenever your doctor prescribes you medication or refers you to a specialist—whenever he undertakes a treatment plan, be sure to get answers for all of your questions. You want to be able to understand it well enough to confirm it to him and be able to explain it to others.

Mention potential problems before you begin

After your doctor has explained his recommended treatment plan, you should try to anticipate any problems you may encounter. The reason? Nip these in the bud now, so that alterations can be made and you don’t ever jeopardize your treatment.

Acknowledge your life-style on your personal health

The bottom line is this: your doctor and his treatment plan can not work if there is some aspect of your lifestyle that is working against you, that may be negating any progress you are trying to make. For instance, if you are being treated for clogged arteries and your doctor puts you on something like Zocor or Lipitor and refers you to a dietician, you can not continue to eat foods that are high in cholesterol. Simple as that.

Your doctor has done his part, now it is time to do yours.

Advance Directives

Nobody wants to think about it, but for a moment imagine: you’ve been in an accident or you’ve experienced serious medical trauma, something that has left you in a coma, or hooked up to machines. In short, no one can communicate with you and vice versa, but if you could say something, you would speak up and refuse certain treatments; after all, you don’t want to be on life support forever; you don’t want to put your friends and family through that, or cost them pointless thousands of dollars.

However, since you never stopped to think about these issues, doctors continue to perform life-prolonging procedures on you and you keep going. Your chances of passing with dignity fade, and family members struggle to afford the treatment. .

You can avoid this scenario with an advance directive. Advance directives exist in two forms: a living will, and a medical power of attorney.

• A living will is something you put into writing that makes clear your wishes about medical treatments you would not want performed on you if you could no longer communicate.

• A medical power of attorney is simply a legal document in which you turn over those difficult decisions to a trusted loved one in the event you can not communicate those decisions for yourself

Your right to accept or refuse treatment is protected in the US by law and the federal Patient Self-Determination Act (PSDA) does the same because it requires any health care facility that accepts payments from Medicare and/or Medicaid to tell patients about their right to refuse treatment as well as their right to sign an advance directive. However, there may be differing interpretations from state to state, and in any case, it would seem from the following surveys that plenty of health care professionals are resistant to directives.

The results of a survey published in the American Journal of Public Health showed that doctors sometimes over-treat terminal patients with procedures that extend their life while at the same time not doing enough to control their pain. Another survey suggested many health care professionals have a limited understanding of just what advance directives do. In short, doctors don’t know everything about health and wellness, but they know more than most. Us patients don’t know much about it either, but we know about ourselves. Together, there’s a great chance we can figure it all out.

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